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Adventure Gamers' Chris Remo brings to us this fascinating preview - taken from the 2005 Game Developer's Conference...
"I think this is the next generation of adventure games," claimed a slightly haggard Ragnar Tornquist after showing off his upcoming title Dreamfall to Adventure Gamers at the 2005 Game Developer's Conference. A week of preview appointments and late-night parties did nothing to diminish the noted designer's enthusiasm for his labor of love. Animated as usual, Tornquist played through two sections of the sequel to the acclaimed 1999 adventure The Longest Journey.
The theme stressed most in this particular demonstration was a closer and more natural link between the gameplay and the events of the plot than we tend to see in adventure games, which often have puzzles and cutscenes that seem bolted on to the underlying story. Tornquist voluntarily admitted that The Longest Journey had its share of these pitfalls, but everything we've seen indicates that he's well on his way to crafting a game which puts each aspect of the gameplay—from puzzles to conversation system to the hotly-debated combat—in the service of story and character development. The game has monopolized our Hype-O-Meter for as long as I can remember, and I see no reason for that to change any time soon.
The first scene we were shown is from the game's opening, when the player is introduced to Zoë, the only one of the game's three playable characters in this demo. We find her lying in bed unconscious, as sunlight streams through her blinds onto the sheets, with her distraught and silent father sitting at her side. The scene is almost startling in its beauty, and the lush music (a collaboration between composer Leon Willett and Funcom music director Morten Sorlie) is expressive and fitting; slightly reminiscent of Barrington Pheloung's score for the first two Broken Sword games. Zoë is, for reasons not yet revealed, in a coma. Her mother has already passed away many years ago. In a captioned voiceover, Zoë makes a vague and urgent appeal to the player: something terrible is happening (or has happened) and anybody who can help or even knows that anything is going wrong is dead. This being a videogame, the player is the only one with the power to put things right.
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